It was also at Naropa in
1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a
workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her
use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the
demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my
pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of
Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis
and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk
and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it
involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo
that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my
first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey
give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende.
That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken
eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual
links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south
Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened
and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU
FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)
I’m
deeply impressed with the collection
Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by
Marcella Durand and
Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original
essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to
consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors
include
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard,
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke,
Brenda Coultas,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
Tonya M. Foster,
Renee Gladman,
Carla Harryman,
Erica Hunt,
Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky,
Bernadette Mayer,
Tracie Morris,
Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles,
Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen,
Julie Patton,
KPrevallet,
Evelyn Reilly,
Trish Salah,
Prageeta Sharma, Stacy
Szymaszek,
Anne Tardos,
Monica de la Torre,
Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and
Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of
Leslie Scalapino bouncing
outside of language poetry,”
Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL
SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project
of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the
poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan)
though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they
reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.”
There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation
of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of
information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best
of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay
within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how
the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking
across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,”
Rachel Levitsky offers as part
of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND
GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers,
for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman,
a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of
the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a
nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called
upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary
woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman,
a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous
intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?”
And then there is
Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the
poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the
first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets
to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity
between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:
Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an
uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to
refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better
sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old
poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.
One
of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however
much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or
approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or
collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these
pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further
work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to
poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs
my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines
disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths
toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of
resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an
author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest
that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another
anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA:
Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with
Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit
envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to
the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each
of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of
literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their
introduction:
The poets in this collection found their ways to their own
poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of
their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore
states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other
people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists
labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the
terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely
their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle,
that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of
an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde
writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it
is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as
a point of contention and potentiality.
